Blind Plea - How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis | Introducing Last Day

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

To listen to the rest of this episode, search for Last Day wherever you listen to podcasts. When Nadia Bowers's sister Sasha died of fentanyl overdose in 2015, Nadia was seven months pregnant with her first child and had gotten married just six weeks earlier. Suddenly she had to ask herself: how do I go on after the worst thing that's ever happened to me? In this episode, Nadia tells Stephanie how writing her new memoir, Dear Dealer, helped her process her rage, grief, and the anxiety of new motherhood while navigating this crippling loss. Pick up a copy of ⁠Dear Dealer⁠, available wherever books are sold or listen to the audiobook, narrated by Nadia. Order Steph’s book Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis at ⁠https://bit.ly/LastDayBook⁠, and the audiobook at ⁠https://bit.ly/3RW4WtF⁠, or wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lemonada. Hello, listener. It's Stephanie Whittles Wax. I host a podcast called Last Day. It's a show about the moments that change us, fundamentally and forever. I'm dropping into your feed today because I want to share a new Last Day episode with you. It's a conversation with actor and author, Nadia Bowers, about fentanyl and sibling loss and making sense of all of it through writing. It's gutting and beautiful. and somehow we also laughed so much throughout, because how else are we going to get through it? That's exactly what Last Day is all about, talking about the hard stuff like addiction and mental health and suicide and gun violence and the worst days of people's lives,

but doing it with humor and a very healthy amount of cursing. I've tried to stop. I can't. I can't. So settle in, and when you're done, I hope you'll check out the rest of last day, Just search for it wherever you're listening right now. Well, hi, friends. Welcome back to Last Day.

Last Day is a show we launched in 2019 about the opioid crisis. Its name comes from the idea of starting with someone's last day and then rewinding the tape, trying to figure out how we could have prevented it. In the earliest episodes, it was an investigation of two specific last days. Stefano Cordova, brother of Jess, and Harris Whittles. brother of mine. Oh, and I'm Steph. Stephanie Whittles Wax. I'm your host. My brother, Harris, was a writer, a comedian, a gentle, weirdo, genius, boy man who died of a heroin overdose on February 19th, 2015. It's been nearly seven years since we released our first episode of last day. Over the years,

we've examined other epidemics that are hard to contain and getting worse every day. Mental health then suicide, gun violence. In season four, we started talking about all sorts of last days, big, huge, unanticipated moments of change, the before times and the afters. Well, we went on hiatus at the end of 2024 because I went off to write a book. And guess what? This week, the book comes out. It came out yesterday. It launched into the world and is now sitting on the shelves of bookstores. It's called Last Day, How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis. It is everything I've learned about opioid use disorder and harm reduction and how to save lives. It is this podcast and all the stuff I've learned since distilled into

something you can hold and share and highlight and dog ear and give to a friend or a sibling or a policymaker who needs to understand what to do about this crisis. Because there are real things we can do. Oh, and also, this is actually very important. I need you to go order the book or the audiobook narrated by me like right now before we go any further. First week sales genuinely matter. They tell the publisher, the booksellers, the world that this subject has an audience and deserves shelf space. So please go to bit.com, b-it.lyt.L.L.S. Last Day book and order. your copy. If possible now, you can press pause. I promise I will still be here when you come back. Should I play some hold music? Okay, that's that. Thank you so much for ordering a copy of the book. I so

appreciate your support and I hope that you enjoy it. Also, stay tuned to the end of the episode to hear an excerpt from the audiobook read by me. Now, what am I doing here? Well, in honor of the book launch, we are doing four new episodes of Last Day, revisiting the opioid crisis from a few different angles. It's a throwback mini-season, and I couldn't be more thrilled to welcome our first guest. Nadia Bowers is an actor and a writer. She had a sister named Sasha, who died on July 31, 2015, the same year I lost Harris. When Sasha died, Nadia was seven months pregnant with her first child. She'd gotten married six weeks before. Her birthday was nine days earlier. Nadia has written an absolutely gutting and heartbreakingly beautiful book called Dear Dealer, a memoir. Our losses feel so

similar that when I read Nadia's book, it felt like reading my own story. Also, we both picked our kids up from sleepaway camp this past weekend, so we're basically twins. I can't wait for you to hear our conversation. Well, hello, friend. Hello, hello. We are here today to talk about such a fun topic, which is our dead siblings, Nadia. We both have this amazing distinction of being in the world's shittiest club and then also publishing books about it, which is... I know, and I think we were inaugurated in the club in the same year, too, in 2015. Yes. We... certainly were. So I am so glad you're here, and also I'm so sorry that you're here. Whenever you come on this show, it's like not for a good reason. Oh, you have to laugh. You do. You do. We do.

Yeah. Well, anyway, your book is so beautiful, Nadia. It is like absolutely gobsmackingly gorgeous. And you paint this vivid portrait of your sister, Sasha. But to orient our listeners who have not yet read the book, but will after this conversation. Let's start when you were kids. So Sasha was two and a half years older than you. Your family grew up in Bramford, Connecticut. Your mom was a pediatric cardiologist. Your dad was a professor of psychiatry at Yale. A house full of dummies. My gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I was like very impressed with your family. Thank you. I'd love to know more about Sasha. So growing up, how would you describe her and characterize your relationship, the two of you? She was that person, like, you heard her voice before she entered a room. You know, she had this

this kind of Tasmanian devil, like the Looney Tunes kind of energy. Like, she entered a room and it was like a wind change, you know, and sometimes that was great. Sometimes it was a lot. But I remember also there's like one family vacation. We have some have siblings and we were with our nieces and nephews. I was with them. They were very little. And I was like hanging out with them and like, you know, playing with them. And then like Sasha showed up.

She's like, I'm storming through the door. She's got carrying cages of guinea pigs and like buckets of arts and crafts. And I was just like, oh, it's fucking over for me. The cool one just walked in. Game over. Game over. Exactly. Yeah, and when she discovered this word exuberant, she was like, that's who I am.

Her passions for a buffet, a person, a song, a band, a piece of clothing, just one item of food. You know, we had to go to this one county fair every year so she could get her fucking onion rings, you know. And then she would look at a buffet. Yeah, she would look at a buffet and be angry. She'd be like, how do I decide? Like, how, why are they doing this to me? And then she would just, like, you know, fill her plate and then make herself sick because she just couldn't figure out how to, you know. It's fascinating to hear you talk about her because she sounds like my brother.

I mean, I talk a lot in my first book in my memoir about how he would do the same thing. His ordering behavior at restaurants was absolutely unhinged. It was like every single fucking dish had to be gotten. And everyone, it was like it was nuts. It was like a sport. ordering was a sport. Wow. Wow. So did it cause some stress? Or was he just like, yes, let's go. Let's go. Let's like do it all. Oh, yes, let's go. Yes, let's go. I mean, let's do it all. Like, he loved fish and he would go to like a thousand fish concerts. Like everything was just so much all the time. Just hedonistic in this way of like exuberance is a great word for it. I think that's right. We always say like he lived so hard for 30 years. Like in a good way. Like he juiced a lot. lot out of this life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. And was he that way in relationships, too? Because Sasha was as well, like she loved you hard. All in. All in. All in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'd love to talk about her Tourette's syndrome because you write about this not being diagnosed until college. And not having the language to describe something that you're experiencing, I think, is really difficult. I wonder what it was like when you two were young. And you have a lot. You had no idea and she had no idea why she was doing the things she was doing and what kind of a toll you think that took on her? I really think that that is like the centerpiece in a sort of metaphoric way. It's this thing you can't control that feels, you know, she would often let it sort of release it when she was alone or in her car or one can only imagine it feels like scratching an itch and one can only imagine that's probably what it feels like to use.

But I think when it first started, my parents were both physicians and they knew, you know, what it was. And I think it was all blessed them in the name of protection. So my parents sort of kept the name of it from her. And I think it was like, well, she's really smart. And I think that we call them Sasha's ticks. And of course, I like noticed them a little bit, but I was kind of like, she's awesome. She's my older sister.

She's so cool. Like, I don't know. Just like, whatever. It's who she is. Yeah, it's who she is. And I don't think I knew it was a problem until someone I got the vibe. And I saw what it did to my parents. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I think you write really, in this really powerful way, sort of linking these two things, right? Like Sasha's Tourette's and having to mask that and then this delve into substances. I mean, do you feel like those are linked? And when did you sort of first notice that the substances were becoming an issue? I think they're linked also in the sense of self-esteem. So in terms of like a physical thing, I can't necessarily say something conclusive about that. But I think that they made her feel bad about herself.

And look, we are not dissimilar. You know, I was experimenting with things too. She would just go a little harder. You know, there was one incident in high school when I noticed that like she was getting in trouble. She was like, you know, she was getting caught at parties. And I think she was starting to drink sort of her junior year in high school is right, kind of when she started to drink. And I think I think alcohol was like, oh, this must feel really good. I think it probably really soothed her Tourette's in a way.

And then she went to college and college is like, you know, there was alcohol in college. There was some weed. And I talk about this in the book, like for a period of time, there was each drug that kind of got introduced. It seemed like it would work. I think she was drawn to it because I do think it soothed her anxiety about the ticks. I think it, you know, it was relief. It was fun. And then it really was in her late 30s.

She got dealt a couple life blows. Like our dad got diagnosed with cancer. She had an engagement breakup. And then her father died. And all those things like boom, boom, boom. And she met someone during that time who introduced her to OxyContin. And game over. It was seven years from that point.

But the opioids, opioids, they're a different game. I find it to be absolutely excruciating to sit on the sidelines and watch this happen to someone that you love. How were you showing up for her, or was it hard to show up for her? You know, I think I was just turning a corner in my, approach when she died because I was pregnant. We've talked about this, the overlapping of also having children right at the time that we're losing a sibling. My husband and I were married in June of 2015. Sasha died in July and I gave birth in October. And leading up to it, I was so tired of being angry. And I was pregnant and I was having, I don't know, those feelings of like,

I don't want to carry the anger. A couple of times. I sort of arranged or forced some little intervention. She agreed to go to rehab again. I'm like, cool, did it. You know, she's there now, you know. And feeling like, cool. Like, we're making some progress here. And then those things didn't stick.

And I thought, oftentimes there's so much shitty behavior. And I was angry. I was angry, really, really angry. And I was angry. She missed our father's funeral. We didn't get to mourn him because the day after his mom, memorial, we had an intervention for her, and I felt like I was alone for a long period of time.